E3 2018: Wrap-Up

By Shamus Posted Friday Jun 15, 2018

Filed under: Industry Events 176 comments

I wasn’t able to talk about everything I saw from E3 this year. There’s just too much for one guy to see and write about. I did manage to watch most of it, but I’d have to keep up the current writing pace for two or three weeks to cover everything properly.

I didn’t stream the Sony press conference. I watched it. It was a good show. But I wan’t up to streaming and giving live commentary. I just wanted to put it on my second monitor, slouch down in my chair, and let the information wash over me.

I also skipped Square Enix and Nintendo. The former because I was busy with mundane tasks in meatspace, and the latter because Nintendo coverage just isn’t a priority on this site. Nintendo is important as an industry-wide force, but I don’t have any reason to talk about their individual titles.

But before we end this week-long orgy of marketing, half-truths, and sensory-saturating trailers, let’s talk about a couple of the things I missed:

Death Stranding


Link (YouTube)

The first time I saw the weird-ass Death Stranding trailer in 2017 I thought, “Okay, that’s pretty crazy. But how is Kojima going to turn this into a shooter?”

For those of you who don’t follow this stuff, here is the short, gossipy, and probably-full-of-misconceptions version. Seriously, this is all based on hearsay, speculation, and Reddit threads. I’m sure other people will offer alternate (and possibly more accurate) versions of events in the comments below.

Hideo Kojima is a true auteur game developer. He’s got a head full of crazy ideas and no respect for genre boundaries. He’s given us a lot of wild, unconventional games over the years. Some of them didn’t totally work for audiences, but when he got a hit he usually knocked it out of the park.

His biggest hit was the Metal Gear series. At some point publisher Konami decided that what they wanted from this madman was a stream of safe, reliable sequels. This is like a movie studio deciding they want Terry Gilliam to spend his entire career making buddy cop movies. That’s not a good use of that sort of talent, and that sort of artist is probably going to get bored with the work very quickly.

If Kojima was a western developer, he probably would have jumped ship to form his own independent studio and gone looking for a different company to bankroll his schemes. Sid Meier, Wil Wright, Peter Molyneux have all done this sort of thing during their careers. But for whatever reason (cultural, personal, or economic) Kojima stuck with Konami, even as they squeezed him for sequel after sequel.

Looking back, the Metal Gear series makes a lot more sense to me now. I always wondered why this flagship series was so strange and disjointed. The games jump around on the timeline, switch POV characters, and pile on layers of increasingly convoluted lore as they go. While they all focus on a military guy using stealth to Do Stuff, the mechanics and tone change wildly from game to game. (And sometimes from scene to scene.) This doesn’t make sense for how a storyteller would present a world, but it makes total sense for how a restless game designer would behave when pressed to keep doing the same thing. In the past he’d made dating sims, adventure games, roleplaying games, mech games, and a bunch of other crazy stuff. But once Metal Gear became a cash cow, Konami had him locked into one genre, in one universe, with one cast of characters.

Konami is really only interested in money, and over the years they realized that their gambling machines were a lot more profitable than their videogame division. The result was that they treated the game company like a rental car: Bad working conditions, nasty business practices, irresponsible behavior, and open contempt for the consumer. Eventually they forced Kojima out, and Death Stranding is Kojima’s first project with his new benefactor, Sony.

I’d just assumed that DS would be a shooter. I mean, that’s what Kojima has been making for decades. That’s what sells these days. That’s what gets funded. And maybe it will be. I have no idea. I watched the 8-minute E3 trailer and I never saw the main character holding a firearm or making use of any weapon. I have no idea what this is. The trailer features the main character (an amazing likeness of lead actor Norman Reedus) wandering around the wilderness with increasingly improbable packages on his back, with little vignettes of him looking at old photographs and talking about the past. There are some invisible monsters hunting him.

So… that’s pretty strange. Kojima is finally off the leash, and anything can happen.

Last of Us 2

Geeze, Nuaghty Dog. I don't think REAL LIFE is this detailed.
Geeze, Nuaghty Dog. I don't think REAL LIFE is this detailed.

I was on board with this trailer right up until it dropped into gameplay mode and I remembered how much a hate the TLoU gameplay. Like, really hate. Irritating, frustrating, boring, uneven, and designed around scripted moments rather than emergent ones. I wish this was a movie I could watch.

Spider-Man


Link (YouTube)

This could be good. This trailer is so heavy on cutscenes and the scant gameplay is so heavily scripted that I don’t feel like I’ve really seen much of it. The final product might not be nearly as rigid as it appears. The main story looks like it’s made of solid cheese. That’s fine if the story stays in the background and we spend most of our time with the gameplay, but if the cutscenes are long (as in this trailer) and if the gameplay is filled with quicktime events to make things more “cinematic” then I want nothing to do with this. I love Spidey and all, but he has a terrible track record when it comes to videogames.

What I’m looking for is something like Arkham City: A world that’s open so I’m not constantly following a linear plot, but not so open that everything feels aimless. I want a little story, but I don’t want to stop playing every five minutes to watch five minutes of a Spider-Man student film / fanfiction. I want a combat system that recognizes and rewards mastery, but I don’t want Spider-Man dropping dead every few minutes if my timing is off. Some sort of metroidvania deal where the gameworld opens up as I go would be nice too.

This video shows some more gameplay, but… I dunno. I guess we’ll find out this September.

I don’t have a lot of hope at this point, but we haven’t had a decent Spider-Man game since 2004 and I think we’re long overdue.

Wrapping Up

The high points of the show for me: Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk 2077, Rage 2, Beyond Good and Evil 2, new Prey content.

Disappointment: No news on Borderlands 3.

Bigger disappointment: Microsoft threatening the world with their cloud-based, AI-Driven griefing engine disguised as a PC gaming platform. We need to form a super-team and stop this before it’s too late.

Biggest disappointment: All the journalists who applauded for the above. Seriously guys? Am I the ONLY game critic that remembers GFWL?! WHY WOULD YOU APPLAUD FOR THIS? Also, applauding for platform exclusives is a bad look and you should probably stop that too.

That’s it for E3. Next week things will go back to “normal”.

 


From The Archives:
 

176 thoughts on “E3 2018: Wrap-Up

  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Wait,you did not watch meching america great again?Thats a Shame.

    Other than devolvers conference,the rest of these were just various degrees of meh for me.And Im not saying that just because of the jokes,but because pedro was the only game that actually grabbed me.

    1. Redrock says:

      Oh boy, Pedro looks amazing. Although the 8-minute gameplay video begs the question whether it’ll manage to stay fresh for a whole playthrough. Guess we’ll see.

      1. Preciousgollum says:

        Oh boy, Pedro looks amazing. Although the 8-minute gameplay video begs the question whether it’ll manage to stay fresh for a whole playthrough. Guess we’ll see.

        Indeed.
        What did you think of the Devolver Conference overall?

        1. Redrock says:

          Who, me? Didn’t watch the thing. I typically don’t watch press events or awards ceremonies unless someone is paying me to cover them. Otherwise, I look for coverage by people whose job it is to cover them. Or,you know, people like Shamus, who choose to suffer for us. Because those things, in my opinion, are straight up painful to watch.

          Out of what Devolver showed, the Mech America Great Again looks fun. Not interested in SCUM. Basically any game with a survival system is a no-go for me. Dunno what I’m gonna do about that when We Happy Few finally releases. Overall you can’t help but think that Devolver is somehow managing to make the wacky banal. “A Devolver game” is becoming a generic description, and that’s probably not what they want to happen.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            You should watch it.Its brief,its funny,its honest.They basically take e3,cut out all the bullshit,condense it into 20-30 minutes,and deliver it all with a smile.

            As for pedro becoming stale,hotline miami managed to remain fun for two games,so doing these wacky stunts for just one is not impossible.

            1. Redrock says:

              True, but Hotline Miami had that lightning fast die-repeat cycle. From the demo of Pedro, that’s all one seamless walkthrough, I can’t tell whether it’s a bit too easy. It looks easy, but so do some Bloodborne walkthoroughs, so that’s not saying much.

              1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                To me it looks like therell be some kind of bullet time mechanic to help the player execute all those cool tricks.Also,maybe some kind of bullet magnetism.But,we never saw any of the enemies shoot at you,so how difficult it will be to dodge shots is still a mystery.If its a one shot kill for both you and the enemies,it can be a fun romp of short burst adrenaline pumping levels,like in hotline miami.But even without it,it still can be fun to execute all those cool moves.Sadly,we have a long wait before we can actually see more details.

                1. Scourge says:

                  https://armorgames.com/play/15980/my-friend-pedro

                  Play the original flash game and see if it should be fun.

  2. Darren says:

    “applauding for platform exclusives is a bad look and you should probably stop that too”

    So even if the game is good, it should be rejected in solidarity of some theoretical all-inclusive platform that we’ll get someday?

    Companies make consoles because they want to make money. They fund exclusives so that they can demonstrate the power of their console, guaranteeing a product of some quality that they can use to entice customers and thus make their platform more appealing for third party developers, who will provide the bulk of the product that generates money for the platform owner. Sometimes, exclusives are terrible. Other times, exclusives are some of the best titles–both technologically and otherwise–available.

    Unless you have an answer for how to create a platform for video games that isn’t owned and operated by a single corporation, exclusives will continue to exist, and no amount of “but what about the people who don’t want to buy that platform” sentiment will change that fact.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      So even if the game is good, it should be rejected in solidarity of some theoretical all-inclusive platform that we’ll get someday?

      That would be a fine argument if not for the fact that the applause happened before anyone even saw anything about the game.They were applauding the “exclusive” part,which is a really shitty thing.

      Unless you have an answer for how to create a platform for video games that isn’t owned and operated by a single corporation, exclusives will continue to exist

      Thats a false dichotomy.Its also the same reasoning that people used back in the day when movie studios owned movie theaters.And yet,somehow,both the movie studios and movie theaters survived for quite a long time even after being separated,even after any movie could have been projected in any theater.

    2. Nimrandir says:

      The typical riposte to the ‘but why make consoles?’ argument is a relatively unified hardware standard, with manufacturers distinguishing their products through general quality and non-essential features. This model works for almost any appliance or device that isn’t a video game system, modulo temporary stuff like video player ‘format wars.’

      I get that the history and culture of video games make this all but a pipe dream, but I’m willing to call it something about which I can dream.

    3. Shamus says:

      For context:

      I was referring to the parts of the show (particularly during the Microsoft event) where the screen would flash:

      EXCLUSIVE!

      …and they would applaud uproariously. We hadn’t been shown the GAME yet. They weren’t applauding a game, they were (apparently) applauding the exclusivity itself. This happened several times.

      1. Darren says:

        Ahhh. Yes, that’s bad. I’d argue that there is some excitement to be had from the fact that a console exclusive will almost certainly really make use of that console’s abilities, but, you know, that requires a game to be shown.

        1. Agammamon says:

          certainly really make use of that console’s abilities

          wat?

          A consoles abilities? You mean as a mediocre PC? Or that you’ll find gameplay mechanics that force you to use dumb peripherals like the touchscreen on the controller? Or Sony’s preferred method of taking your account on a multi-platform game and locking it to the PS4 because you used it on a PS4 once (thank you Fortnight).

          Let’s not forget that consoles *are just getting to HD at 60FPS* – right when PC’s are transitioning to 40k @60 and/or greater than HD screen resolutions at 120FPS+

          1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

            I’d say it mostly applies to controls and performance. You can usually tell when a game was made for a different platform than the one you play it on, especially if they did a barebones port.
            And if they develop it for a specific console, the game should perform well on that platform.

            But those are pretty flimsy justifications for holding a game hostage to sell your consoles.

      2. Thomas says:

        A lot of commenters suggest Microsoft filled their crowd with a _lot_ of people who they knew would cheer for anything.

        I believe it. They were whooping for the Microsoft exec coming on stage.

        1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

          Are we sure they weren’t actually paid Microsoft employees?

          1. Thomas says:

            I bet some of them were.

        2. Redrock says:

          Isn’t this how these things go? People at Apple events start clapping before anyone even comes out onstage. I wouldn’t read too much into it. There is such a thing as anticipatory applause.

          And a lot of people would like Microsoft to actually step up and get something exclusive. You know, a small, marginalized group called “Xbox owners”.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            People at Apple events start clapping before anyone even comes out onstage. I wouldn’t read too much into it.

            But thats precisely the problem.Apple already is synonymous with unhealthy brand loyalty.

      3. BlueBlazeSpear says:

        Maybe I was momentarily struck by a bout of optimism, but the impression I had was that it was just huge relief from the crowd at hearing Microsoft say that they were actually going to have console exclusives, which doesn’t seem like a thing that anyone should have expected or hoped for.

      4. Shoeboxjeddy says:

        People want Xbox exclusives because they own an Xbox. The idea of an exclusive is a good thing to an owner of that platform. Yes, even to someone platform agnostic who owns a bunch of different platforms. A LOT more money was splashed onto God of War as an exclusive game than would have been if it was just an Activision multi-platform game because the existence of God of War is marketing to buy a Playstation 4.

        Being an exclusive in no way guarantees quality (just like brand name or budget doesn’t do that) but it does increase the percentage chance of a good thing happening. Ninja Theory has outright said that their budget and capabilities will dramatically increase as an exclusive studio to Microsoft, for example. As a fan of theirs, I’m hoping for great things as a result.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          A LOT more money was splashed onto God of War as an exclusive game than would have been if it was just an Activision multi-platform game because the existence of God of War is marketing to buy a Playstation 4.

          True.But its not the amount of money thats important as is how it was spent.Was that extra cash pumped into marketing?Or projected loss of not being sold to a huge chunk of market such as xbone?And what about the risk if the sales dont reach the goal,as has been the case with other multi million customer games?How would such a blow reflect on the company?Etc,etc.

          People keep saying that being an exclusive is what makes god of war so polished.But if that were the case,wouldnt every halo be much more successful than every battlefield?Wouldnt the always cheaper nintendo be long dead?

          There are tons of things going into a single video game,and if any one of them were so irreplaceably crucial,everyone would be doing that one thing first.Getting that initial influx of cash can help only if you know how to spend it,and you have room to improve with that spending.

          1. Shoeboxjeddy says:

            Many Halos WERE probably more successful than many Battlefields… on the Xbox. Saying that Halo on Xbox should outsell Battlefield on Xbox + Playstation + PC is pretty silly for all but the most wildly successful games.

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              And yet thats what the pro exclusive camp would like you to believe.

              Also:

              Many Halos WERE probably more successful than many Battlefields… on the Xbox.

              First,many is not the same as majority,let alone all.
              Second,were they more successful than battlefields just on the xbox?Because if at the same time battlefield on the ps or battlefield on the pc had more success,it would still mean that that halo did worse against just a single platform,let alone all three.

              1. Shoeboxjeddy says:

                I responded to your specific question, which was a mistake. I should have taken on your whole paragraph, which was pure nonsense. Correcting that oversight now.

                “People keep saying that being an exclusive is what makes god of war so polished.But if that were the case,wouldnt every halo be much more successful than every battlefield?Wouldnt the always cheaper nintendo be long dead?”

                People are saying that God of War’s exclusive status lead to it having more resources and development time… because that is an inarguable fact. So “wouldn’t every Halo be much more successful than every Battlefield?” This is silly for a number of reasons. We were talking about level of polish, and you shifted the goal posts to either critical or commercial success. Being polished doesn’t guarantee a warm critical response (check out some reviews to Zelda Twilight Princess to see this in action) but it does make it more likely. And again, having a really pretty, polished game is a good way to make a successful game, but you can’t absolutely GUARANTEE that it will sell. PUBG is selling super well and it’s extremely well known to be unfinished and buggy. Meanwhile, Gears of War Judgment was a handsome, well put together game that sold the worst of its entire series, mainly due to a market that had tired of that console generation. The same happened to God of War: Ascension.

                “Wouldn’t the always cheaper Nintendo be long dead?” This is an odd question for a number of reasons. First, it presumes the budget of Nintendo games to be low, which would not always be the case. Second, the first statement was about exclusive games having improved budgets and polish, which might be the MOST true for Nintendo above all else. Non-Nintendo games on Nintendo consoles always seem sort of shoddy compared to the impressive quality of Nintendo first party games that are often (but not always) impressively polished, even if their graphics don’t always measure up to comparable titles elsewhere.

                1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  People are saying that God of War’s exclusive status lead to it having more resources and development time… because that is an inarguable fact.

                  More resources =/= more development time.Plenty of sequels can attest to this.

                  We were talking about level of polish, and you shifted the goal posts to either critical or commercial success.

                  Fine,Ill rephrase myself:
                  But if that were the case,wouldnt every halo be much more polished than every battlefield?

                  First, it presumes the budget of Nintendo games to be low, which would not always be the case.

                  Compared to other big budget games for xbox and ps,the budget is most likely lower.For development at least,not for marketing.But no one can really say for sure,because these things are still kept secret for some reason.

                  Non-Nintendo games on Nintendo consoles always seem sort of shoddy compared to the impressive quality of Nintendo first party games that are often

                  This is not quite a fair comparison,because of the better support available to nintendo compared to everyone else.You should compare nintendo exclusives made by someone not owned by nintendo to multi platform games made by someone not owned by nintendo.

                  1. Shoeboxjeddy says:

                    Perhaps you are unaware of this, but God of War (4) was developed over a five year period. It is not a guarantee that an exclusive title will receive a long development time (see Majora’s Mask or Crackdown 2) but sometimes this will be allowed (Crackdown 3, Sea of Thieves).

                    Halo titles pretty much are DRAMATICALLY more polished than Battlefield titles, with the notable exception of the Master Chief Collection, which was a development train wreck for various reasons.

                    Yeah, we don’t know what it took to make a Breath of the Wild, but if you think developing all that over years and years and years was cheap… read a book about game development some time.

                    Studios like 343 or the God of War team would have similar superior resources like the Nintendo team. Not sure why would we need to make a distinction there.

                    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                      It is not a guarantee that an exclusive title will receive a long development time (see Majora’s Mask or Crackdown 2) but sometimes this will be allowed (Crackdown 3, Sea of Thieves).

                      So you are saying that title exclusivity has no bearing on the development time,but its dependent on other factors.If you are agreeing with me,why are you arguing against me then?

                      Halo titles pretty much are DRAMATICALLY more polished than Battlefield titles, with the notable exception of the Master Chief Collection, which was a development train wreck for various reasons.

                      So once again you are saying that exclusivity has no bearing on the polish,but is dependent on other factors.If you are agreeing with me,why are you arguing against me then?

                      Yeah, we don’t know what it took to make a Breath of the Wild, but if you think developing all that over years and years and years was cheap…

                      Cheaper than a different title =/= cheap.If you are arguing that developing a more resource demanding game is not more expensive than developing a less resource demanding game over the same period of time…read a book about game development some time.

                      Studios like 343 or the God of War team would have similar superior resources like the Nintendo team. Not sure why would we need to make a distinction there.

                      You are correct,I was a dumbass there.It does make no difference.

                      On the other hand,since you did mention 343,unlike bungie,they often(but not always) release halo on pc as well as xbox.So once again,exclusivity has nothing to do with how well a game will be polished.

                      Seriously,this is pointless.If you are going to say every time that console exclusivity MAY OR MAY NOT give more money to the developers,which in turn MAY OR MAY NOT lead to a game being more polished,….why are you arguing against me saying that console exclusivity does not ensure more money and that more money does not ensure more polish?

    4. Philadelphus says:

      Unless you have an answer for how to create a platform for video games that isn’t owned and operated by a single corporation, exclusives will continue to exist, and no amount of “but what about the people who don’t want to buy that platform” sentiment will change that fact.

      You mean one besides the personal computer?

      1. SKD says:

        As a PC gamer and former multiplatform gamer I could point to the issues with holding up the PC as the anarchic platform (cough, cough MS Windows, hardware configurations and software conflicts) but I would rather just state my wish for exclusivity handling. I don’t have too much issue with any platform getting short term exclusivity for a game if the platform wants to invest in the development and production. I can somewhat understand, though I still disagree, with the stance of not allowing a port to the competing consoles.

        I would much rather that the exclusivity contracts be for a period of time, say 3-6 months, and then the developers are allowed to release PC and competing console ports if they wish. There will of course be a number of developers that still never port their products off the originating platform and there will still be bad ports but the onus choice will be entirely on the devs/publishers. Some studios already do this to a degree, ex: new Tomb Raider series and GTA5.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          (cough, cough MS Windows, hardware configurations and software conflicts)

          Heres what I dont get:who says that if every computer had similar hardware there would be no consoles that would ensure perfect running of games designed for it?If every console was just a pc with predefined and unchangeable specs(which x bone and pisser already are in a sense),thered be no reason for developers to spend money on ports,which they could then funnel to better use*.Meanwhile,the console manufacturers would need to work only on better integration of their components and proprietary os when making an upgrade/next gen,instead of making whole new hardware practically from scratch.The reason pc is so bloated these days is because its designed to either do multiple things,or be easily converted into any function.

          But when you design a specialized computer from start,say one geared towards bitcoin mining,you can pick components that are best suited for that purpose and make them into a very powerful machine that does nothing else.Similarly,if you make a computer just for emulating x bone(for example),youd get way more power than if you were to play on an actual x bone(assuming you can get your hands on their software,that is),but it would suck at everything else.And once again,we already see this with movie theaters.Everyone will tell you that imax,a specialized type of theater,provides with (currently) ultimate movie seeing experience,but that does not mean that any movie is made to be seen only in imax.You can easily watch the same movie in any other theater,or at home,or wherever,just with a much lower quality.And the movie industry has hardly been struggling since the studios were detached from theaters.

          *Optimistically speaking.Realistically,they probably wouldnt do that.

    5. Taellosse says:

      Unless you have an answer for how to create a platform for video games that isn’t owned and operated by a single corporation

      This is already a thing. It’s called a “personal computer” or “PC” for short.

  3. Chuk says:

    I would be cautiously optimistic about Spider-Man, but instead I am throwing caution to the wind. Seriously, if it is “Arkham game – tank battles + webswinging and spider-quips” I am so there.

    1. Viktor says:

      Spider-Man isn’t hard to get right, either. You need the Whedonesque quippy dialogue that’s all the rage these days, a basic superhero plot with not much investigation and a lot of cool setpiece battles, and the occasional emotional moment without crossing the line into angst. That’s not difficult. Dude has a bunch of really good villains that are made for video games, a power level that’s easy to adjust as needed for balance or plot reasons, cool mechanics, and a well-known personality and origin that means you can skip a lot of the setup you’d need for something like a Kamala Khan game. The fact that the vast majority of his games have sucked is just dumb on someone’s part.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Probably because its so easy no one puts any effort into it.And you need at least some effort to make a decent game.

        1. Galacticplumber says:

          I’d argue web of shadows counted as decent but not great. Added some good to the combat system, but lost out on story and web swinging quality. Better fighting, worse all the things that made spiderman 2 stand out.

          1. Redrock says:

            It’s not a decent Spider-Man game without proper web-swinging.

            1. Baron Tanks says:

              Thankfully it had fine web swinging. Not great, but fine.

              I just wish I had a Playstation to play this next one if it’s any good but I don’t want to go through the hassle of buying another machine.

              1. Redrock says:

                I still find it hard to believe that Marvel will keep this one a Sony exclusive forever. Hell, even Sega is porting frickin Yakuza to the PC these days, and they have been loyal to Sony for years. So there may be a chance.

                1. Preciousgollum says:

                  Still find it hard to believe that Marvel will keep this one a Sony exclusive forever. 

                  The new Spider-Man game is being directly published by SONY Productions – it is a first party title.

                  There is no reason that they would give that up to their competitors, and the only option to play it outside of owning a PS4 would be some sort of streaming service.

                  Regarding films: SONY essentially sub-contracted Marvel and Disney to make them a Spiderman film.

                  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                    I thought that was true just for movies,but marvel still owned him for the games?Did the contract give sony rights for all spiderman outside comics?

                    1. Redrock says:

                      Nope. Marvel Games came to Sony with the offer to make a Spider Man game published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, apparently.

    2. Hal says:

      The risk with a guy like Spider-Man is that he’ll use all his pithy lines and snappy comebacks after about 15 minutes of gameplay. Then you’ll hear them over. And over. And over. And now what was clever and amusing is making you wish death on the developers, the voice actors, and anyone else involved in the making of the game.

      1. Marc Forrester says:

        You need to not tie them to the usual context-free dice rolls. Have a fixed list that get used once each throughout the course of the game, and trigger them by specific combinations of combat move, bad guy type, location and circumstance. More incentive for the player to keep varying their style.

        1. Agammamon says:

          That’s a lot of work. We’ll go with the other thing.

          1. Viktor says:

            1: Limit the lines to no repeats since system was turned on. Yes, players will still notice the bad ones, but we don’t want dead air and we won’t want it to get droning.
            2: No generic lines. If there’s a generic line, players will hear it once a play session, and that will get droning.
            3: Each boss gets taunted 3-4 times, each unique. Once in the first ~30 seconds of a fight, once when his health is low, once when Spidey’s health is low, once around the time of his super attack. These lines should feel natural and normal, since they are, and will only repeat on later playthroughs(which is fine).
            4: Other than the bosses, Spidey has one or two unique taunts for every type of generic mook(NYPD, AIM, etc). These are played the first time he encounters a group of at least X size in a playsession. (this may need tuning depending on how the game is designed)
            5: Spidey also has a unique taunt for every area. These are played the first time he fights in a region or zone where he isn’t using another taunt that fight.

            There. Honestly, not terribly many lines of dialogue, but it should keep players from posting “I’ve fought SHIELD agents more fearsome than you” to every Discord on the planet.

            1. Preciousgollum says:

              2: No generic lines. If there’s a generic line, players will hear it once a play session, and that will get droning.

              Resident Evil 2 Remake seems guilty of this. Leon Kennedy shouting “Asshole” and “F**k youuu” when shooting zombies, DURING GAMEPLAY, like something out of Team America: World Police.

              Incessant game chatter is here to stay, it seems, because ‘immersive experience’ means that they think you want to hear dumb character speech.

              1. Mr. Wolf says:

                What? For a guy that came across as very strait-laced in the original, that Leon should be swearing at the people he shoots seems completely out of character.

                1. Preciousgollum says:

                  What? For a guy that came across as very strait-laced in the original, that Leon should be swearing at the people he shoots seems completely out of character.

                  Yea absolutely. Leon’s best part of his character can be summed up like this: “Aaaaadaa…?” “Aaaadaaa!”.

                  Also, Survival horror game cutscenes should be sparse, because it is a reward for getting through, and there needs to be some type of ‘alone’ feeling.

                  This RE2 Remake looks loaded with cutscenes, and they also want to have Marvin the Cop stick around in the main entrance of the Police Station, giving obvious ‘magical black guy wisdom’ even though he is bitten, and the main entrance looks much smaller and there are like ‘Mission Objective’ reminders on the screen and AHHHHH IT’S GOING TO BE DISAPPOINTING ISN’T IT!?

                  I mean, looking back, it is AMAZING how characters in RE2 and Metal Gear could be made 20 years ago with no facial features, no moving mouth, yet seem so… expressive. Easier to dub, too.
                  I played them again about a year ago – they’reee greaaat!

                  In the Re(si)make 2 trailer, of what little they show of Claire, she does some ‘Japanese woman’ head movements & expressions that don’t fit the English dialogue … it is really goofy.

                  If they wanted to properly remake Resident Evil 2, it’s either got to be faithful, or completely fresh. Have randomised items & enemies, or mix it up with Dead Rising style events timer. New!

                  This Remake looks like they’ve shoved Resident Evil 7 stuffing into the anal cavity of Resident Evil 6, and then tried to season it with RE4 – but this has WHITE CROSSHAIRS!
                  If it don’t taste like 4, it ain’t gonna work.

                  1. BlueHorus says:

                    In the Re(si)make 2 trailer, of what little they show of Claire, she does some ‘Japanese woman’ head movements & expressions that don’t fit the English dialogue … it is really goofy.

                    ????

                    ‘Really goofy’ has always been part of the charm/point of the early Resident Evils, up there with ‘tank controls’ and ‘nonsense plot’.
                    (Let’s pretend I embedded the JILL SANDWICH video here.)
                    The games only got better when they either embraced these ‘features’ (RE4) or dropped them (RE7, apparently?).

                    It’d be like going to a clown show and complaining about the way everyone was wearing facepaint and doing silly things.

                    1. Preciousgollum says:

                      My answer is that there are different kinds of goofiness.

                      I suspect that they didn’t show a lot of Claire in the trailer, because, unlike the mostly static male characters, developers tend to expect that their female characters should emote more – hence movement.

                      As a result, the disparity between what a western audience would expect as ‘western’ animation vs Japanese tradition of acting, movement and gestures is more apparent. Presumably, more detail on character models AND possible mo-cap performances is going to give away more subtle details – hence ‘Japanese woman’.

                      A good example of ‘recognising different animations’ would be, if you’ve played Metal Gear Solid 1, having to spot a specific guard via ‘the way they walk’.

                      Spoiler: It’s Meryl, and she walks differently to the other guards.

                  2. Shoeboxjeddy says:

                    The comparison for RE2 Remake should be RE4, as that’s clearly the style they’re aiming for. Your comparison to 7 is seemingly off base since it’s not first person. As a fan of the RE4-5 style, 2 Remake looks very promising to me. The original games come off as stilted, annoying, and mechanically ancient and were never appealing to me as a result. And my opinion is by no means a rare one, it’s why RE2Make exists in the first place.

      2. Redrock says:

        You know, I don’t have a problem with Spider repeating lines. I can take it. But when a game is trying to use generic lines to get me invested in a relationship between characters, and then cycles between exactly two or three goddamn sets – that’s when I start to go crazy. I’m talking, of course, about Final Fantasy XV.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          So you dont like:
          shepard
          wrex
          ?

          1. Redrock says:

            Ah, but they didn’t have this exchange after EVERY combat encounter. Or in every elevator. Or every time you leave the ship. The guys in FFXV say the same things constantly. While you do the same things constantly. It’s a goddamn tedious game, is what I’m getting at. And the banter makes it worse.

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              Wait….15 is that one where you have four hot dudes driving around the country killing monsters?I thought everyone liked that one because it had four hot dudes.Why dont you like hot dudes?

              1. Redrock says:

                The dudes’ hotness is greatly exaggerated. The thing is, I couldn’t stop playing that game. So a part of me loved it. Another part hated most of its design decisions. It’s a really weird experience, all things considered. The reviews for this one were… severely lacking in depth, let’s just say.

            2. TheJungerLudendorff says:

              *snaps fingers*
              That’s it!

              I’ve come up with a new recipe!

              1. Redrock says:

                I can taste test for you.

              2. Iunnrais says:

                I somehow found this endearing, despite the repetition. I don’t know why, the same sort of repetition really annoys me in other games. Goodness knows I played dozens of hours of FFXV, whereas I couldn’t do that with most other JRPGs as an adult. (as I kid, I devoured JRPGs)

    3. Cubic says:

      I don’t usually like media tie-ins, but it’s apparently Insomniac who are making Spider-Man, so I’m feeling optimistic for once.

  4. Redrock says:

    I think there’s a moment in the Death Stranding trailer where Norman Reedus actualy unsheaths a funky looking rifle, so there will be some shooting. And stealth, obviously.

    I don’t know if I’m that optimistic about the idea of “Kojima unleashed”, actually. MGS V was him pretty unleashed. The incessant credits at the start of every mission. The completely unnecessary open world. The torturously slow helicopter rides. The stupid gear system (so I need to find a blueprint, then gather a bunch of rare resources to develop a weapon, then wait hours of real time for it to be ready, and THEN it will charge me money and resiurces for every use?). The even more useless weapon modification system (you can put a rifle stock on a grenade launcher. Won’t affect anything, but it will look cool). All that, but almost no actual decent story? You can’t blame all that on Konami. It’s still a great game, but if ever there was an auteur in need of a gentle yet firm producer and editor, Kojima is that auteur. Death Stranding is intriguing as hell, though.

    The Last of Us 2 gameplay looked more fake than the game-speak in The Division videos. No way all of that animation and environment interaction is organic. What worries me most is that Uncharted 4 was just so BORING compared to Uncharted 2 and even 3. I dunno. I just wish Naughty Dog would try something else. Maybe a new Jak game. Something to cleanse the palate.

    1. evileeyore says:

      Redrock
      “I think there’s a moment in the Death Stranding trailer where Norman Reedus actualy unsheaths a funky looking rifle, so there will be some shooting.”

      Yes, at 4:08.

      “And stealth, obviously.”

      It’s an extreme hiking simulator with stealth added on bits obviously. ;)

      1. Zekiel says:

        It really does look odd. The actual gameplay bits don’t look that great to me to be honest (I don’t mean in the sense of being boring, but more in the sense of not looking very smooth).

        I do respect trying to do something different – there are so many games (even very good ones) that just follow a very similar formula. But those trailers also kind of look weird for the sake of being weird.

    2. Redingold says:

      There’s a video by a Ubisoft animator examining that Last of Us 2 and explaining how you might do all the things in it organically. Certainly the video is heavily choreographed, and they carefully planned all the positioning and timing to minimise animation jank, but I don’t find it hard to believe that any particular thing that happened in it could happen in the actual game.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl8k8nR1h2Y

      1. Viktor says:

        That’s about what I’m thinking. It was clearly completely put together to look good and show off specific stuff, but nothing in it seemed beyond what I’d expect from a next-gen version of TLOU. The only big shock to me was all the ground combat/hiding under the car, and I suspect that’s actually in the final game. How contextual it will be is a question, but I’m betting it’s pretty fluid, just because it would be massive jank if they didn’t get it exactly right.

      2. Redrock says:

        If it’s anything like Uncharted 4, all those contextual things will be quite few and far between. I remember when TLOU was announced, it gave that impression that it will be a highly immersive experience, enemies running out of ammo, dropping exactly what they have left on them, etc. And none of that is technically difficult. ND just seem to be less and less interested in organic gameplay.

        1. Olivier FAURE says:

          Stuff like enemies running out of ammo isn’t “technically” difficult in the sense that you don’t need incredibly complex math to address it, but it’s pretty damn hard to implement without ruining the gameplay.

          Basically, you have to handle stuff like the fact that some player may have a very slow playstyle, so every combat might end with enemies running out of ammo (especially if the player tries to wait them out, which is exactly the kind of efficient-but-boring strategy you don’t want to incentivize).

          The part we saw in this year’s trailer where Ellie talks to the mook leader before finishing him off only works if the player kills him last (even though the player may want to kill him first because he looks strong), if none of the other NPCs we saw in the area show up, and if the player goes for a finish instead of a more prudent headshot from a distance. All these things are easy to implement in a trailer and super hard to get right in gameplay, especially because designers often have a hazy / optimistic model of how player will react to a given system.

          1. Redrock says:

            Nah, limited ammo is pretty easy if you’re going for a more hardcore stealth game. Make the enemies try to make their shots count. Make every shot much more powerful. That way, you have more incentive to play stealthily, for example. Both to avoid getting shot and to collect live ammo from enemies, because each bullet is precious. That would have been tense and atmospheric as hell.

            TLOU was much more gamefied then people are willing to admit. The level design was at times particularly forced with the placement of chest-high cover. The way a bunch of zombies in the sever would randomly start dropping large bags of shotgun ammo, slyly hinting at things to come. And while the ending was pretty cool, as well as some moments with Ellie, a lot of the story boiled down to what I call “suffering porn”.

            Huh. I guess I don’t like TLOU as much as I thought.

            1. Olivier FAURE says:

              Make the enemies try to make their shots count. Make every shot much more powerful. That way, you have more incentive to play stealthily, for example. Both to avoid getting shot and to collect live ammo from enemies, because each bullet is precious. That would have been tense and atmospheric as hell.

              Well, yeah, sort of, but that’s easier said than done.

              Like, if you have the well-crafted atmospheric gameplay you describe, then having enemies drop whatever they carry is almost a trivial addition. But having that gameplay isn’t a walk in the park. You have to worry about stuff like communicating NPC intentions (communicate to the player, somehow, that a NPC is not shooting because it’s waiting for a better shot, not because it’s dumb), balancing (is the game too frustrating because you keep getting killed by NPCs who shoot you twice from behind and you never get a chance to even see where they are?), avoiding negative feedback loops, etc.

              That’s the kind of thing I meant when I said “designers have an optimistic model of how players react to a system”. “Tense and atmospheric” isn’t a given, it’s the best-case scenario.

              The way a bunch of zombies in the sever would randomly start dropping large bags of shotgun ammo

              Actually, they dropped whatever you shot them with, which was weird in its own way (why are all the zombies I’m killing carrying flamethrower gas?).

              1. Redrock says:

                I think it depended on the location? I’ll bet there were times when the zombies dropped what you needed, not what you had or used on them. Which is a decent mechanic in and of itself. But it clashed with what was advertised and indeed increased the ludonarrative mumbo-jumbo the game suffered from.

    3. BlueHorus says:

      I don’t know if I’m that optimistic about the idea of “Kojima unleashed”, actually. MGS V was him pretty unleashed…
      ..if ever there was an auteur in need of a gentle yet firm producer and editor, Kojima is that auteur. Death Stranding is intriguing as hell, though.

      Have to agree. I’m baffled by the success of the MGS games, particularly people praising the storyline, which I’ve always found not just bad, but insulting.

      Reading Shamus’ account of Kojima & Konami, I’d like to think that a lot of what made the Metal Gear series annoying to me was Kojima sabotaging the system, or doing random shit out of boredom: ‘Let me ooouuuut!’ etc. So given free reign, he’ll make something much more coherent. That’s the hope, anyway.

      But yeah…I guess we’ll see how many of MGS’s ‘quirks’ came from the man himself.
      I’m sure Death Stranding will be different – but ‘Ice-cream made with a special blend of five kinds of shit’ is different.

      1. Preciousgollum says:

        Have to agree. I’m baffled by the success of the MGS games, particularly people praising the storyline, which I’ve always found not just bad, but insulting.

        Metal Gear Solid is a stealth game, with moments that have the feels … from 1998 onwards.

        Now, I also like Splinter Cell (and other stealth games), but does it have the feels ?

        1. Preciousgollum says:

          But yeah…I guess we’ll see how many of MGS’s ‘quirks’ came from the man himself.
          I’m sure Death Stranding will be different – but ‘Ice-cream made with a special blend of five kinds of shit’ is different.

          I should add, that it isn’t all or just Kojima that makes Metal Gear special.

          There are other people too. Yoji Shinkawa does the cool designs & the Artwork, which is good stuff.

          There is the Military advisor, Motosada Mori.

          And of course, the programmers, who made some very interactive environments back in the day.
          And I’m sure there are other people too.

          It would be like saying that Bioshock is only the work of Ken Levine.

    4. Shoeboxjeddy says:

      You can blame the story part on Konami. They literally locked the devs out of certain parts of the office park in order to force the game to release before they finished it. And that’s on top of doing stuff like demoting the head of graphics design to be a janitor for a month as an office punishment, as if they were school children. All this to avoid spending any more money on… one of their best reviewed and highest selling games ever. That they then used the engine from to create one of the most embarrassing, worst reviewed games in its genre (Metal Gear Survive).

  5. Oscar says:

    Speaking of Microsoft’s cloud-gaming ambitions (which align perfectly with their “put everything in the cloud so we can charge monthly for things from now on” ambitions in all their other business units) – does no one remember how they got the press’ imaginations going by promising cloud-augmented Xbox games that would be super-duper powerful and amazing back during the Xbox One’s release? There’s been nothing holding back someone who wanted to do that. What does it say that it hasn’t happened?

    1. Marc Forrester says:

      It probably says that it’s actually crazy difficult to develop for, and would restrict their audience to the tiny percentage of people with fast, reliable broadband access.

      1. Preciousgollum says:

        Yeah, ‘Microsoft Cloud Future Games’ is ‘Brown Shamanism’ or BS for short.

        Alongside: ‘We don’t understand our Algorithms they’re so advanced oh no so anything bad that happens to you is Computer Magic and we the companies have no responsibility’.
        Tech reporters should F off with that S right now. It isn’t funny. It is foppish nonsense. Bad reporters. Stop it – Now.

        OnLive was so bad:

        Buying a full priced game, Deus Ex Human Revolution, on a computer that could barely run it, was preferable to playing Deus Ex: HR on OnLive from their initial £1 sale.

        The Steam Link is… acceptable. I’ve used it, but everything needs to be setup properly for it to work – No Ethernet Power WallPlugs. It is difficult enough to Stream on a Local Network.

        The new consoles are already rumoured for 2020, and Intel is aiming to bring out its own GPU at the same time.

  6. Nimrandir says:

    Are we sure the audience was truly applauding, or was it like that Xbox One showing where they played audio of clapping over a darkened crowd that wasn’t making that much noise?

    1. Shamus says:

      They did that? I didn’t hear about this.

      This Dumb Industry.

      1. Nimrandir says:

        I didn’t watch any of those events myself, but I recall a Super Bunnyhop video showing something along those lines back around the new-generation kickoff.

        I hope I didn’t misinterpret a joke back then. These people do enough inane stuff without my mistakenly heaping more on them.

        1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

          These companies have a habit of flat-out lying to their audience, so I wouldn’t put it above them to pull something like this.

      2. TouToTheHouYo says:

        It’s also a well known secret that these companies plant employees – or otherwise paid individuals – in their audiences to applaud and cheer for these reveals. Doesn’t mean it’s entirely disingenuous but they certainly do their damnedest to prompt the desired response.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Wait,that is a secret?As in,people try to keep it hidden?

          1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

            I think it’s one of those things that everyone knows, but are impolite to mention to their face.

        2. Tom says:

          This sort of “managing” the crowd has been going on since forever. There’s an amusing story about when the Marx Brothers were starting out and in some way bribed members of the audience to laugh and applaud disproportionately for their act’s first showing, but then the theatre changed the billing schedule at the last minute and they ended up giving false popularity to a competing act and practically corpsing on stage themselves…

          1. baud says:

            From one of my class on theater, it’s even older than that; the wikipedia article talks about classical times and they existed in France between the 16th and 20th century.
            Wikipedia Article on it

  7. Xander77 says:

    Haha. Oh man, this is literally the first time I’ve seen someone react to the LOU2 footage in a way that isn’t “holy shit, they finally perfected combat to the point that regular gameplay looks like a smooth choreographed fight sequence”.

    1. Thomas says:

      I love for this stuff, but I can understand not liking it. Naughty Dog want to make you feel inside their world, but they do it at the expense of you _the player_ feeling inside their world.

      That beautiful animation of Ellie desperately escaping the blow of a machete and lashing back furiously, requires the game taking much more control of the animation than people are used to.

      It’s not really about your mastery as a player, it’s about experiencing Ellie’s world and giving you control of the fight as a tool to put you in her shoes.

      1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

        So basically we can get cutscene-levels of gameplay animation, but the downside is that we get cutscene-levels of actual gameplay.

        That would have to be handled very carefully I think, lest the game devolves into glorified quicktime events David Cage style.

        1. Thomas says:

          Given their other games, I don’t think it will ever end up _quite_ like that. Naughty dog are increasing how systems driven these events are if anything – I really think dodging the machete wasn’t a scripted sequence. The player made that happen. _But_, here is the catch, Naughty Dog made the animation of it happen. The player didn’t intend it to happen in the way it did. So in that way it is a bit like an infinitely branching QTE

      2. Olivier FAURE says:

        That beautiful animation of Ellie desperately escaping the blow of a machete and lashing back furiously, requires the game taking much more control of the animation than people are used to.

        Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

        It’s also kind of disconnecting when you realize that Ellie is super scared of that guy in the dodging mini-cutscene, but when in gameplay takes bullets to the chest and hammer blows that would have broken her arms and the only effect is a small decrement of her life bar.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Ludonarrative dissonance in a video game?Inconceivable!

          1. Redrock says:

            Ludowhat, now?

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              Lucha underground disco biscuits,if you prefer.

              1. Redrock says:

                I do indeed. Was it Jim Sterling or TB?

                1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  It was TB.

                  1. Redrock says:

                    Thought so. I miss that guy.

    2. Adam says:

      I was pretty surprised that Shamus is criticism of TLOU game play and the TLOU 2 trailer was “Irritating, frustrating, boring, uneven, and designed around scripted moments rather than emergent ones”.

      “Irritating, frustrating, boring, uneven” this is a subjective opinion about the gameplay and to each his own. Although I wholeheartedly disagree with each of the points you can’t really refute a personal experience with a game. (If he said this about the Uncharted games I would agree. Except they are really easy so I doubt he would say frustrating).

      But “designed around scripted moments rather than emergent ones” this to me though is almost completely untrue. At least about TLOU 1 the trailer for the new one could have been scripted. But for the case TLOU the only scripted moments happen at the end of fights and the way the AI acts leads to emergent moments. Is TLOU’s combat more scripted than Half Life 2’s combat? I played the game more than once and the combat is not scripted. Perhaps there was something Shamus was directly referring to.

      One of my biggest pet peeves of game criticism is when people critique TLOU gameplay as generic and boring and Shamus is not alone in doing this. There is actually a great video that does an analysis on its game play that I recommend: https://youtu.be/hzgSzbMryFY

      This sort of became a rant of TLOU but heck I don’t have a video game blog and The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of all time.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        It really is weird why Shamus disliked that game so.I have not played it,but to me it looks similar to tom braider,and he enjoyed that one.Though,in tom braider,as silly as things got,you were never hounded by a tank.

        1. Adam says:

          “Tom Braider” was this a typo or a joke. Either way it is hilarious.

          I am glad you brought up Tomb Raider 2013 because the game play of it and TLOU are very similar. Funny that were released within 5 months of each other. The differences in gameplay is that Laura is much more agile than Joel and the arenas in Tomb Raider had more vertical options than TLOU. Also there is more ammo in Tomb Raider.

          I wonder if Shamus used a controller when playing Tomb Raider or not because perhaps the negative response comes from using a controller to aim in TLOU. I have been aiming with a controller longer than with a mouse so it is something I rarely notice when in most shooters.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Its a joke that they came up with during spoiler warning.I like it both because its funny and because it neatly distinguishes that game from the early tomb raiders.I use similar jokes for remakes that have the same name as the original,like dewm and thiaf.Its much easier constantly writing the year they were released in.

            Funny that were released within 5 months of each other.

            Thats because both were stealing drawing inspiration from uncharted.

          2. Redrock says:

            The gameplay of TLOU and Tomb Raider feels very different, to me. The shooting in TLOU is wobbly and the enemies are bullet sponges, as is the norm for ND. The stealth around humans is kinda OK, but the stealth around zombies is extremely annoying, because it’s mostly about moving veeeeery slowly. A test of patience more than anything else. And the instakill fungi people can go straight to mushroom hell. TLOU is nowhere near as kinesthetically pleasing as TR. Plus, there is exploration in TD.

        2. Shamus says:

          Tom Braider had puzzle tombs and parkour. Those were the bits I liked. I wasn’t so much a fan of the stealth and cover-shooting. TLOU is just the stealth and shooting, plus the enemies are even more bullet sponge-y and cover is even more rigidly enforced.

          Kinda frustrating. I’m big on stories, and TLOU has some of the best storytelling in gaming. The dialog is smart and subtle, the mocap is good enough to convey meaning with body language or facial expressions. The characters are powerfully realized. It nails its themes.

          But the gameplay. Ugh. Every fight is a chore. Hate it so much.

          The thing is, I really don’t think you can “Fix” the combat in a way that I’d enjoy it. I’m into fast moving shooters with lots of mobility, and that would be tonally wrong for TLOU. What are you gonna do? Give Joel six guns, quad damage, and the ability to double-jump? That would be obnoxiously dissonant. The stop-n-pop shooting is pretty much the mechanics the game MUST have for the story to work.

          Having said that, I’d be glad to go through it again just for the story, if only the fights were shorter. Those gunfights in Pittsburgh drag on forever.

          1. Preciousgollum says:

            Tom Braider had puzzle tombs and parkour. Those were the bits I liked. I wasn’t so much a fan of the stealth and cover-shooting

            You should perhaps give Tom Braider: Legend a go.
            And TR: Anniversary.
            They’re both about exploration, and the controls are MUCH more straight forward than the originals… They are pretty games, fairly straightforward but some big puzzles, and they don’t have any of that ‘boo hoo my father’ nonsense.
            … but they do have a bit of ‘goon’ combat every now and then that is middling at best. They are all incredibly cheap on any Steam Sale.

            I’m biased a bit, because I got TR: Legend with my first ever GPU purchase.

            If you like either of those, then Tom Braider: Underworld is the slighty more… ambitious sequel to both.

  8. Gargamel Le Noir says:

    Cyberpunk 2077 was probably the great winner of this E3. Everyone who got access to the 1h demo came out with star in their eyes, including Yongyea who’s normally a pretty austere guy. One of his comments even wondered if they somehow sprayed some kind of euphoric drug in the room.
    To hear them, Cyberpunk 2077 will be the peak videogame experience.
    Also the creator of the original RPG seems like a ridiculously cool dude.

    1. Henson says:

      That sounds promising. However, I’d still seriously temper excitement for this game. There have been a few too many potential problems with development to assume its quality just yet.

      If nothing else, it’s better to keep expectations lower so that they can be exceeded later, rather than high expectations dashed.

    2. evileeyore says:

      “Also the creator of the original RPG seems like a ridiculously cool dude.”

      Mike Pondsmith is an incredulously cool dude.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        “Also the creator of the original RPG seems like a ridiculously cool dude.”

        Mike Pondsmith is an incredulously cool dude.”

        He is indeed a stupefyingly cool dude.

        1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

          Dare we say a flabbergastingly cool dude.

          1. eaglewingz says:

            A hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is.

      2. Cybron says:

        Sometimes he is. Other times, he’s making Cyberpunk 2020 v3.0.

    3. Marc Forrester says:

      Spraying some kind of euphoric drug in the room would be incredibly on-point for a cyberpunk game.

      1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

        Or as we know it today: the Hype drug.

        It certainly looked interesting, but we’ve seen enough “vertical slices” of games that such universal praise warrants a scepticly raised eyebrow.

        1. Nick Powell says:

          The big thing CDPR have in their favour is the fact that the Witcher series already exists. Even if what they come out with is just a reskinned version of the Witcher 2 it’ll still be something I’m interested in

        2. Preciousgollum says:

          Or as we know it today: the Hype drug.

          The ‘come-down’ drug for watching E3 trailers:
          Ineedproofthen

          1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

            The “social drinking” of E3:
            Collectively poking fun at all the stupid things they do on stage.

    4. Redrock says:

      Eh, a 1-hour hands of demo isn’t a great way to judge a game like that. When you cut away the euphoria, what they saw in there was some okay first-person shooting, and some dialogs. All of it heavily staged. Now, we have the implication of a complex and reactive multi-player narrative, but the demo has nothing to do with that. And anyway, I don’t think it’s fair to call a closed-door demo a winner at any expo.

  9. Cubic says:

    Last of Us and Uncharted shared the problem of endless sequences of firefights, which after a while lost my interest. Actually, I dropped out of Uncharted 2, I think, after an endless, fruitless search for some secret passage in some temple. But the writing was on the wall with the firefights. A pacing issue, more or less.

    The Jak games weren’t as pretty but had much better gameplay.

    1. Redrock says:

      Boy, how I miss the Jak games. Did I make that clear? I only mentioned it a million times.

      1. Cubic says:

        Man, Jak X was something, I tell you …

        Actually, I think it was Jak 2 that reeeally pulled me into open-ish world games. Great setting, great characters, great game. They managed to stuff racing, skateboarding, shooting, platforming and whatnot in one package and it felt great. Though when I replay Jak 1 it does feel better and better each time; maybe it doesn’t have the same depth but it works impressively well.

        Jak 3 was okay but somehow lacked spirit compared to the others. Maybe they should have worked over the setting and story once more. I liked the final race through the center of the world or whatever it was, good finale. (It’s some time since I last played it. Maybe there was more afterwards.)

        Jak: The Lost Frontier … I did buy that game but (gak) stalled early and never picked it up again. I had almost forgotten it. Maybe I should give it another shot.

        Wow, nostalgia.

        1. Redrock says:

          For some inexplicable reason I skipped Jak 2 and went straight to Jak 3 after playing the first one. I never got the secret ending, too, so the changes were… jarring. That was before you could just see everything on YouTube, too. Piecing it all together and figuring out this new world when the game assumed you were already familiar with it from Jak 2 was a big part of the experience.

          When I finally did play Jak 2, five minutes wouldn’t pass without me going “ohhhh, so THAT’s why that guy hated us in Jak 3”. Fun times.

          1. Cubic says:

            Going from Jak to Jak 2 was a leap too, but I can only imagine skipping the backstory for Jak 3, lol.

            I rewatched some of the cut scenes from Jak to Jak 3 and … man, it was pretty 90s. Jak with a soul patch and the girls with bare midriffs and suspenders. And I still think quasi-gf Kiera is kind of an unacknowledged bitch, come to think of it. Ahh yes.

            Jak 3 seemed pretty okay in the cut scenes, maybe I’ve misremembered it. Jak 2 made a big impression at the time so it could be the sequel had an uphill job. Not fair, Cubic, not fair!

            1. Shoeboxjeddy says:

              Jak 3’s opening feels completely inorganic after the ending of Jak 2. Jak is betrayed by the city and thrown out to his death and his friends all kind of shrug their shoulders about it. All so that Jak is forced to ingratiate himself with the new “gigantic and unambitious Mad Max rip off” new desert faction. And as I vaguely recall, they took the possible love interest triangle from 2 and hacked off one of the limbs almost completely. I wonder if whatever writer liked the one character left the company or something? Or the VA couldn’t do as much work? And driving the desert cars feels like crap compared to the hover cars in 2. It’s not ALL dire though. Jak 2 was tuned sadistically tough and had astronomical difficulty spikes. 3 is tuned like a fair game that is okay with you beating it.

              1. Cubic says:

                I recall reading that Jak 3 adjusted difficulty dynamically, which Naughty Dog saw as a feature. I didn’t like that, perhaps because Jak 2 made me an M type.

                Jak 2 did cause me to ragekill multiple controllers on the way to victory. I later replayed it on the PS3 when the HD edition came out and thought it was easier then. Did I git gud or was it something else? It still felt like an achievement to finish it at least.

                (Some re-released games are made easier. Rockstar’s GTA releases on ipad are easier and a bit shortened compared to the PS2 games. The ipad games are, I hesitate to say it, a bit more fun too.)

              2. Cubic says:

                And more to the point, I too think the story of Jak 3 had some weaknesses. A bit too similar to Jak 2, even if that was what I secretly wanted. Good summary.

  10. Dev Null says:

    Am I the ONLY game critic that remembers GFWL?!

    Ah the memories. Someone needs to give a medal to the guy at Microsoft who comes up with the acronyms.

    “And we’ll call our console the “ex-bone”. And we’ll call our cloud gaming service “Godawful”.”

    1. Nick Powell says:

      Remember when Kinect was Project Natal?

  11. Preciousgollum says:

    Regarding Kojima and Metal Gear Solid V, it seems to be most of what has been covered on the blog post, however, there is a missing aspect:

    Kojima wanted to finish Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain properly , because he wanted it to be his last Metal Gear game… even Metal Gear Solid 2 was supposed to be the last one at the time – hence why the ‘series’ tends to vary between installments…

    …while Konami were having none of it and wanted the game out the door and into customers hands.

    Metal Gear Solid V had its beginning section lopped off and sold as a separate product, and the ‘Final Chapter’ of MGSV: Phantom Pain never fully materialised.

    —————————————————————————–

    … for anybody that said MGSV story was lacking, well, that was the point. People complained that the story was taking up too much space in previous games, so they mostly got rid of it in favour of having ‘Third Person Stealth Far Cry’. It is sort of supposed to be gibberish, so new people to the series don’t care too much if they skip and just want to get on with the game. The ‘fan service’ is buried for the fans to find.

    There are bits at the very end that I much appreciate, though, and overall it is an amazing Stealth Game; it’s presentation was top-notch. In terms of loading screens, a lot of games are ‘guilty’ of a boring and masked loading screen, such as the Mass Effect elevator, of Deus Ex Mankind Divided and the train ride (cutscenes).

    Unfortunately, MGSV will probably end up with a mixed reputation at best, since the drive to port it to previous gen consoles means that some (messy) compromises must have been taken during the design and production state.

    Oh, what could have been…
    ——————————————————————————-

    Death Stranding has been much of a tease, and it is starting to take shape as to what it is.

    The camera angle and character stances ‘looks’ a bit like MGSV in Space with weird Sci-Fi Space ghosts… so basically the first mission of MGSV.

    I don’t think fans are hanging on its every teaser and existence, since that is what windmill journalism is best at…

    …but it will be interesting to see what it is when or if it comes out. Cautiously optimistic.

    1. Redrock says:

      As I wrote above, I don’t think Kojima is entirely blameless for the state of MGS V’s story. He had a lot of time and resources, and he wasted a lot of it on needless bloat. To put it quite simply, Konami didn’t dump David Hayter. Konami didn’t come up with the bullshit non-character of Skullface. Konami didn’t put people to hours of work designing almost identical scopes and rifle stocks with zero gameplay significance. Every time you browse through all the rifle stocks you have in MGS V, just remember that that money could have been spent on actually finishing that last chapter. Also, every time when you hear one of Jack Bauer’s five or so recorded lines.

      1. Preciousgollum says:

        Konami didn’t come up with the bullshit non-character of Skullface.

        … but I like Skull Face. He is basically a Ghost in The Shell villain but in Metal Gear. He was so close to winning. The voice actor did a good job.

        Also, adding different rifle scopes wouldn’t be anywhere near as expensive as a whole game chapter.
        Yea, there’s disagreement over who is to blame for not finishing the game… but it is amazing that there is even a disagreement – compared to situations where other games are rushed out the door unfinished and with cut content repackaged as DLC being the norm. *Cough* Total War: Rome 2

        Thirdly, and I hate to do this: David Hayter as Snake was losing its edge. Over time his performance became more… croaky. Perhaps this was deliberate but I dunno. MGS1 will always be his best performance.

        They also needed to make David Hayter’s Snake somehow get to sounding like Richard Doyle’s Big Boss, and Kiefer Sutherland achieved that mid-point.

        Then there is the spoiler territory:
        Kiefer’s Venom Snake isn’t Snake, but… well he is as well. He used to be the Medic.

        And since we are seeing the game from the point of view of Venom Snake, and he has had all sorts of mega-hypnosis and conditioning done to him, AND he has brain damage, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that he is an unreliable narrator.

        Perhaps Venom Snake is imagining his OWN voice as the Medic the whole time, but he actually sounds like ‘David Hayter Snake’ to other people. Remember, the two characters swapped identities. So perhaps ‘Actual Big Boss’ now sounds like the Medic I.e Kiefer. The extreme confusion that Venom Snake is experiencing in the Hospital, is the experience of him hearing what used to be his own voice, as spoken by another person, like hearing your own voice on a telephone.

        it’s even referenced at during the end of MGS4 that ‘The Patriots’ had the tech to run AI and control information, but they didn’t have the ‘Mission-Impossible’ style spy & hypnosis tech to completely change a person… but the Big Boss crew obviously did, because they used it on Ocelot.
        And MGSV plugged the gap of how Big Boss died twice.
        Job done.

        Probably not worth thinking too hard about the voice change lol.

        And, the credits per mission, I think that was some frustrated trolling on behalf of the creator. It isn’t that bad, since episodic content also does this.
        I mean, this is a series that made people play as Raiden in MGS2, back before trolling and memes were a thing.

        1. Redrock says:

          Of course designing the scopes isn’t as expensive as designing a whole chapter. But it’s just an example. The principle is important: MGS V is an unfinished game which is at the same time extremely bloated and disrespecting of the player’s time. Come to think of it, Final Fantasy XV is quite similar.

          Now, in both cases the companies probably rushed the creative team. But, also, in both cases, the creative team had a lot of time and resources and creative freedom given to them. And failed to utilize those resources effectively.

          Now,if Konami wasn’t Konami, they could have finished the game with DLC, like Square Enix is trying to do. So Konami still sucks, no question there. But the fact that the problem even came up is also, at least in part, a failure on Kojima’s part to, as director, actually direct the project.

          Also, I definitely don’t buy any narrative justifications for the voice change, sorry. As the casting for Death Stranding shows, Kojima just got a real bad case of DavidCageitis – that’s when a game designer needs to work with Hollywood stars just because they can. See also: Bethesda wasted guest stars syndrome.

          1. Preciousgollum says:

            Also, I definitely don’t buy any narrative justifications for the voice change, sorry. As the casting for Death Stranding shows, Kojima just got a real bad case of DavidCageitis – that’s when a game designer needs to work with Hollywood stars just because they can. See also: Bethesda wasted guest stars syndrome.

            And it is also because Hollywood stars bring in the interest. People thought the Metal Gear series was campy nonsense until they hired a Hollywood talent and turned it into ‘Far Cry Stealth’ with MGSV.

            It is similar to The Witcher games – how many people actually played the previous games, instead of going straight for The Witcher III? Presumably many started with II because consoles.
            [I’ve played the first two, not 3].

            Having just realised that Death Stranding is supposedly a PS4 exclusive, then, no, I’m not that interested, because I’m not going out of my way for what is now an old console (PC Player)

            … unless, for example, somebody that I know gets themselves PS4, for Red Dead Redemption II.
            Then I might think about Death Stranding if it gets good reviews & seems OK.

            It was the same for MGS4 – I didn’t play it until 2 years ago because I never owned a PS3 before then. (Xbox 360, PC).

  12. Dragmire says:

    “Disappointment: No news on Borderlands 3.”

    I know, right!?

    Apparently Gearbox has some card infused f2p shooter coming out which may have severely delayed Borderlands 3. I really hope it didn’t get pushed…

  13. bruh says:

    >swears himself to “cover all E3 stuff” on his site before the actual E3 began
    >then all of a sudden realizes that “there’s just too much for one guy to see and write about”
    aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

  14. Preciousgollum says:

    Last of us: Part 2.

    The ‘Ellie-phant’ in the room.

    if this were Game of Thrones, people would be screaming about relationship spoilers…
    [blank] does [blank] towards [blank] and they [blank] together after having [blank]

    However… we seem to live in a post-spoiler age, where things are expected spoiled, including Game of Thrones, as the montage to remind you to watch GoT, basically shows you major spoilers…

    The money-shot was used across multiple publications that I looked at, games-related or otherwise, and I didn’t see anything that went with a ‘neutral’ character pic or box art picture… all money-shot spoilers.
    It was like the Royal Wedding for digital characters. There is an aspect of ‘free marketing’, where for the people who don’t care about the games in their game, can skip the tedium that ‘gamers’ have to go through, in favour of seeing The Iconic .

    I’m of the sense that, it isn’t what someone ‘is’ that matters in fiction, but what they do. Relationships are built in drama so that they can be mercilessly torn down if need be, but now I KNOW that a relationship has been established, I KNOW it can potentially be broken down, but because I also know the now established meta-commenary , people will be looking squarely at Last of Us Part 2 to see if it will validate or invalidate an ‘identity’, at the decision of a narrator. Naughty dog are going to have to walk a tight-rope of careful balancing. We’re all watching in suspense.

    Simpsons: Bart has sent that letter to Edna teacher, inventing an ‘eligible man’ for her… and eventually, the invented character he has to let Edna down without hurting her feelings – because he doesn’t exist. Nolan also deals with this sort of issue in his films.

    One of the reasons that Game of Thrones became disappointing, is because plausibility went right out the window, in favour of contrivance for convenience. It was a ‘cautionary tale’ that retrofits into basic fairy-tale.

    TL;DR – What I am getting at, is that, for some people, the trailer is all they need. The HINT of a thing in a trailer – Game Done. Entertainment had. Achievement Unlocked [Validation Confirm].

    Other people want the movie, without wanting to spend the gameplay time, and other people feel the need to play the whole game before feeling qualified to make value judgement.
    – ‘free-to-play’ lol. The trailer IS a game.

    Or… and I’m making estimations here, the public can say:

    “I like that nice bit in that game trailer, but the rest of it looks terrible because it is so violent! – why would ‘gamers’ want to play this – why don’t they just, y’know, watch the nice bits!? – or watch a movie, since violence is used sparingly in movies and is artful with meaning” etc etc.

    – The habits for consumption of media are in the process of change as a result.
    – (Telltale, Quantic Dream, Naughty Dog, Sony etc etc and … ‘cinematic gaming’).

    Hmmm… it is how a soap opera works on TV… the point is that the main plot line is revealed in advance, to get you to watch it. So, if one episode has ‘oh we’re doing the death of [blank], by [blank], then that information will somehow reach you on the news, sometimes in advance.

    In other words, if you don’t want to know spoilers for your soap opera, you cannot watch a News Program, read a news-paper, and you DEFINITELY cannot look at general news online – twitter also MUST be avoided.

    It is viral marketing at its best, really.

    I, for one, having caught up on some PS3 last year, did enjoy the clunky gameplay of The Last of Us, although I had basically spoiled ALL the major plot of the game in advance, because I thought I’d never get the chance to play it – so I had previously ‘cutscened it’.

    Well… Last of Us 2 does look very violent. Even a Youtube commentator who has played through the first one felt the need to point that out.

    I don’t have any of the current gen consoles, so my options are rather limited, for now.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      This is because we already had her kissing a girl in that dlc.That one was their test,to see how the audience will react,and now they can slap it all over their marketing.

      1. Preciousgollum says:

        This is because we already had her kissing a girl in that dlc.That one was their test,to see how the audience will react,and now they can slap it all over their marketing.

        I haven’t played the DLC – It was short, looked a lot like ‘cut content’, and I don’t see much point in buying premium DLC for a console (PS3) that could stop working, and the HDMI port is busted.

        Again, I think I watched some of the cutscenes for it, but I can’t remember. I only remember the end chase, and the Blanka masks.

        … but I do remember some people talking about it vaguely…

        … unlike Last of Us 2 trailer, which has not been subtle about… anything. The trailer still spoils the existence of a relationship(s), which feels like they’ve looked at a typical post-apocalypse story structure and said “Let’s just do the opposite”.

        It is a 5 year time-jump where “Oh hello all you people”. Remember, the first trailer for Last of Us 2 had Joel and Ellie together, with the classic ‘We’ve beaten up people in a run-down house’ motif – which ISN’T a spoiler – It is a reveal.

        I was actually grossed out in this new trailer by somebody smelling somebody else and telling them that they smelled like “Hot Garbage”.
        I mean, is it ‘negging’?
        DOES the person smell? BOTH!?

        Considering that ‘Smell-o-vision’ hasn’t been implemented yet, it feels like a joke at the expense of the olfactory-challenged audience.

        “Hey, you smell like Hot Garbage; let’s make out”. “Everyone should be afraid of us, now”.

        Props to ‘quirky dialogue’.
        Is this a Prison run by Joss Whedon?
        That part felt like a something out of Bad Lip Reading for The Walking Dead.

        Also, faces in games now are like a Clear Tube-bridge placed across the Uncanny Valley; you can go both sides, but it’s uncomfortable look down while crossing.

        Hmmm… I thought the gameplay presentation
        looked OK. At least it wasn’t a migrane-montage. The scripted ‘fakeness’ that some people seem to be seeing doesn’t bother me much – it just looks like The Last of Us.

        …but the juxtaposition between all this nice-negging and violence feels like a trailer pacing issue. Like, if this were a game, or movie, and some significant stuff happened, you’d want a slight break before other significant stuff happened.

        … unless you are playing PTSD Simulator.

        This was ‘Herodotus ring composition’ of stuff within stuff and back to stuff.
        Or Life is The Last of Us Strange 2.

        1. Shoeboxjeddy says:

          You clearly have no idea what negging is. Which is a good thing, as it’s a terrible thing to do to someone, but this is not it at all. This is flirting. Ellie’s friend says “I need you to be honest with me about something” (and Ellie braces because that could mean any number of things) and then finishes with “how do I smell right now?” They both laugh and then Ellie plays along with her tone by giving a really harsh answer, and again, they both laugh. Negging would be if Ellie, wanting to forcibly take the girl’s attentions and focus them on impressing her, went into insulting her grooming and hygiene unprompted, in a very serious tone of voice.

      2. Cubic says:

        Unsubstantiated rumor has it that if this works well, Jak and Daxter will in their next game do some Richard Gere style ‘gerbil play’.

        1. Preciousgollum says:

          Unsubstantiated rumor has it that if this works well, Jak and Daxter will in their next game do some Richard Gere style ‘gerbil play’.

          …And people wonder why there aren’t many games for younger audiences anymore lol.

          The question is: Will it be cutscene, or gameplay?

          If it is cutscene, then everybody will cheer in artistic triumph, but if it is a gameplay option, nobody will give a Daxter’s posterior.

          Crash Bandicoot’s next adventures to be more like the movie… Crash. Not sure if it will be the 1996 or the 2004 version. Whatever is trending. It will be Cloud-cast to all TVs and displayed on digital public billboards.

          Banjo-Kazooie reboot will be about a struggling ‘Bear’ and an intense drama about the love of instruments, against the backdrop of a Jinjo revolution. Jiggys will be something different entirely.
          Gruntilda and her Sister, Brentilda, will be fighting against the oppressive Mole-people, which has been a never-ending threat since the death of Bottles.

          Sonic the Hedgehog to be renamed Shinji the Hedgehog, and will Pilot a Mech with:
          The soul of his dead hedgehog mother. Amy will tell Shinji that he smells like Hot Garbage, which teases the new Conker installment, of the Furry Friends Extended Universe.

          All media and reflective surfaces to become property of Disney.

          1. Redrock says:

            Aaaand this has suddenly become a weird part of the Internet.

            1. Preciousgollum says:

              Naughty Dog, indeed.

              Depends on if Microsoft want to turn ‘Rare-ware’ into something more different.

              SEGA, I think are extremely well equipped for the job to mess up Sonic even further.
              (Also, the machines in sonic ARE ALREADY powered by imprisoned woodland animals.)

  15. Preciousgollum says:

    Sony started their E3 2018 presentation in a Church building (with the lights) for The Last of Us 2.

    …and then, it seems, moved the audience to different rooms for the rest of the E3 presentation, to the ire of attendees.

    Hmmm… what could it all mean!?

  16. Dreadjaws says:

    … we haven’t had a decent Spider-Man game since 2004

    I disagree. There have been quite a few great Spider-Man games. We just hadn’t have anything as innovative. Ultimate Spider-Man was pretty good, versions of Web of Shadows ranged from great to nearly unplayable, depending on the system and if you can accept a non-open-world game, Shattered Dimensions was quite fun.

    But as optimistic as I was about this new game, all the hype died out when I saw that new trailer. I have all the complaints you have (minimal yet on rails gameplay, cheesy story and embarrassingly bad dialogue), plus the fact that so far they don’t seem to have done anything to improve on the combat from previous games. If I’m playing as Spider-Man, it shouldn’t be harder for me to take down a bunch of mooks than if I was playing as Batman.

    Also, the non-combat gameplay they shown was pretty cliched. Climb a high wall while someone throws stuff at you? Yawn. Forced pursuit? GTFO. I’ll wait on this one until I see some good opinions or some Let’s Play videos.

    1. Taellosse says:

      Agreed on both Ultimate and Web of Shadows – I really enjoyed both titles. Honestly neither one did web swinging QUITE as well as SM2, but they improved a lot of other aspects of the gameplay.

      Shattered Dimensions bad outweighed its good in my opinion. The concept of having 4 different Spider-Men as protagonists was cool, but they were too similar in how they played – having at best only 1 gimmick that was different for each wasn’t enough to differentiate them. Worse, Spider-Man REALLY needs an open-world design to shine – webswinging is just too much of a core aspect of the character, and putting him in closed levels like they did takes too much of that away.

      I don’t give unreleased game trailers a lot of credence either way. I’ve seen too much thoroughly misleading – even outright deceptive – hype surrounding games before they launch. That said, I HATE that costume. The great big white spider on top of a variant of the traditional outfit was a terrible choice. They’ve announced alternate costumes a little, but it’s not clear if they stick around in cutscenes and such yet – which I’d much prefer – nor have I yet seen one I’d want to use on a regular basis.

    2. Nessus says:

      Ultimate was indeed pretty good. Because it was a basically a cell-shade reskin of Spider Man 2.

      Don’t get me wrong, I was surprised for years why it never got mentioned and SM2 got all the love, but in hindsight I think it was because SM2 got people’s attention first, and so Ultimate got remembered almost like just an expansion of SM2 rather than as its own game.

  17. Christopher says:

    I feel like I’ve read that they consulted Dan Slott on the new Spider-Man, which makes a lot of sense to me. The guy’s been the Spider-Man writer since that big One More Day reboot thing(take into account that I last read a current Spider-Man story two years ago, he could’ve been replaced), and so a lot of this game reads like pieces of his run on Spider-Man. Electro got that ugly scar and blew up the Raft during his run, like he does in the trailer. I don’t know who precisely has armored up the villains this time around- with Spider-Man villains, there are a lot of tech whizes that are high up. But a likely candidate could be Alistair Smythe, who in Slott’s run became a sort of nanomachine cyborg wizard and enchanced a lot of villains(including Vulture and Scorpion) with power armor. Spidey’s radio contact here is Yuri Watanabe, a recent(read: only 9 years old) character who’s both a NYPD captain and a vigilante known as the Wraith. Mister Negative here(a “mere” 11 years old character) is a villain Slott also invented, which is why I’ve seen people watching the streams assume he’s an original character they made up for the game.

    Having a game like this based on more recent comics helps it all feel fresh to me. Although I hope they pull from important moments all over Spider-Man’s history, it’s nice to see some new kids on the block in terms of characters they’re using. I’d fully expect them to use plot threads like Pete’s work as an inventor at the Horizon labs, the new Hobgoblin, and, this would be pretty great for an eventual sequel, something akin to the Superior Spider-Man storyline. Green Goblin has been done to death in the movies. Do more Doc Ock!

  18. I just noticed that around 3:05 in the death stranding trailer, a character pulls out what looks like a sniper rifle on a hill. Probably a really small part of the game, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you only got something like 5 bullets to use, but I think it’s refreshing to not have guns be a focus in a game like this :)

  19. Preciousgollum says:

    Microsoft vs Xbox – Who ‘won’, and why.

    [Prelude… “It started with a Kiss”]
    Moving swiftly on.

    Sony’s stunt of ‘Separate venuing’ their games was so poorly thought out that it backfired for them – it made a lot of journalists & news outlets express their dislike for the Sony conference in their write-ups, and some went on to praise Microsoft because ‘there must be a winner’… Of the big two, Microsoft ‘won’ by default.
    Which isn’t a term of endearment.

    Hint – it is because it looks like Sony cared more about gratifying themselves than they did about the people attending the conference.

    I mean, say a person in attendance had mobility issues; requiring they move around rooms makes their E3 more difficult, and potentially speaks to a lack of oversight on the part of Sony.

    Todd Howard with his ‘Solo’ jacket, also known as Bethesda… probably won the conference overall, but that is like saying that you won because you narrowly avoided being squashed by the Trash compactor:
    The words ‘Microsoft’ & ‘Sony’ are seen etched on either side.
    Eyeball-tentacle monster is called a… Devolver, and Square Enix are the two droids: Eidos & Montreal. And, the squidgy flotsam inside, U be soft, and filled with [*illegible*] Creed and Star…links?
    EA was the blaster bolt that failed to have any impact on the situation. Somebody said “You’ll only make things worse”.

  20. According to the game trailer, in Cyberpunk 2077 men will get to…
    …fight robots
    …shoot cool guns
    …drive fast cars

    Women get to…
    … apply makeup?

    (I have no choice but to play as a boring-ass white dude? Again? How fresh. How innovative. How original. How futuristic.)

    1. Terradyne says:

      There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at about 1:12 in the trailer that shows the female version (probably). As far as is known at the moment, you have full character customisation.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Theres also a bit at 0:41 where two female thugs are kicking that guy on the ground in the background of that shady deal.And the hacker at 1:11 seems to have breasts,but I may be mistaken there since its a brief shot.Its still a short teaser trailer,so I wouldnt call it a fair representation of the game.

        However,Im still cautious about this issue since CD Projekt does have an iffy track record when it comes to the portrayal of women versus the portrayal of men.Even in witcher 3,which was far better than the previous 2 when it comes to this,there was a noticeable disparity.Even though you got to play as both a male protagonist and a female sidekick at times(and she was way cooler),camera was often not that flattering.

        They have learned from their mistakes before,so theres a good chance they will improve on this issue as well,but Im not 100% sure on that.Im hopeful,but skeptical.

    2. Preciousgollum says:

      According to the game trailer, in Cyberpunk 2077 men will get to…
      …fight robots
      …shoot cool guns
      …drive fast cars

      Women get to…
      … apply makeup?

      (I have no choice but to play as a boring-ass white dude? Again? How fresh. How innovative. How original. How futuristic.)

      It is to do with the trailers being mass-market and online on YouTube.
      The sad truth of the matter is that ‘the male violence’ is internalised as being ‘the norm’.
      If you think of Game of Thrones, violence against men is ‘normal’, whereas the violence against women on that show, even if the two are treated equally, is always more shocking to the audience than whatever happens to a man.

      … so, depictions of women are ‘kept safe’ in mass media that is allowed to regulate itself. The alternative is to have absolutely, where women are allowed to be depicted in mass media as horrendously as men can be, at any time, or a system where violent scenes are curtailed in mass publication entirely.

      So far, the current system isn’t too bad. Women buy and play games – Cyberpunk 2077 will have playable female avatars and probably some violence against women that those who buy the game will get to see .

      Meanwhile, the rest of society doesn’t have to content with a mass media situation where depictions of violence against women is normalised to the point of desensitisation.

      Also, with regards to the ‘race’ and skin colour bit, not everyone shares this idea of ‘homogeneous character design’ – unless a media creator is careful, ANY depiction of any skin colour picked for ANY situation can be seen as a political statement. So, even if skin colour choice was mathematised randomly or simply pulled out of a hat for assignment to a digital character, SOMEONE is guaranteed to see a pattern and believe it to be a form of social commentary.

    3. strat says:

      And according to the game trailer, in The Last Of Us 2 women get to…

      …smooch each other
      …have all the dialog and screen time
      …repeatedly jam an ice ax into some dude’s head

      Men get to…
      …be murdered by a woman?

      (I have no choice but to play as some boring-ass white chick? Again, like in Tomb Raider and Horizon Zero Dawn? How fresh. How innovative. How original. How futuristic.)

    4. Mephane says:

      While the trailer is indeed a bit misleading and this was also my (only) concern about the game, it has been since confirmed that you will get to create your own character, and the game is fully voiced for a female and male protagonist.

  21. Zaxares says:

    That was really disheartening to read about Konami’s terrible company practices. They’ve made some of my all-time favourite games from when I was a kid, and their games have always had a reputation for being solid and well-made. I guess everything and everyone has their failings. :/

    1. Preciousgollum says:

      Konami are now focused on Pachinko machines and brand recognition.

  22. DeadlyDark says:

    Biggest disappointment – no Splinter Cell reveal. Still, most likely game in a works

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      I have only played the first one,and heard about the rest only in passing.So I have to ask:Which ones do you think are good and worth giving a try?

      1. Preciousgollum says:

        Splinter Cell Guide

        Classics:

        Splinter Cell (1) – although there ‘can’ be some minor light and shadow issues on modern GPU – causes some added game frustration. – fixable.
        Splinter Cell (2) – Pandora Tomorrow IF you can find it. Can give it a miss. Same issue as SC1.

        Chaos Theory (3) – definitely. Considered The best one.
        Double Agent (4)- The first ‘Next Gen one’ – aka xbox 360. Some Moral choice balancing in this one.

        ——————————————————————————-

        New era:

        Blacklist (6)- aka the modern one. It is cheap enough.

        Conviction (5) is the more divisive one, as it is the most Jack Bauer 24-alike.

        Basically, play all of them if you can. They’re all available on PC & consoles. Can start with Chaos Theory, Double Agent or Blacklist for the least hassle.

      2. DeadlyDark says:

        Must plays (in my eyes) – SC1, Chaos Theory, Blacklist
        Not bad, but not great – Pandora Tomorrow, Double Agent
        Awful – Conviction

        1. Redrock says:

          Oh, I liked Conviction. But I’ve never liked Splinter Cell that much, so Conviction was actually a successful attempt to reach people like me. The whole predator thing was pretty slick. But I can see how the fans of the series might be annoyed by it.

          1. Preciousgollum says:

            Oh, I liked Conviction. But I’ve never liked Splinter Cell that much, so Conviction was actually a successful attempt to reach people like me.

            Conviction was… OK. But it did suffer from developers not knowing what to do with the series, E3 bullsh*t trailers that were different each time. And it got into that whole ‘Interactive Torture’ vibe which seemed prevalent at the time.

            It promised something ambitious, and ended up very safe. Also, on PC it runs worse for me than Blacklist for no good reason.

            Conviction was ‘differently safe’, whereas Blacklist was safely safe.

  23. lun says:

    But as you already explained, you skipped the best part, the Sony conference. It needed its own article, not a “wrap up”.

    Which reminds me, unrelated to this, that you really REALLY should play Detroit: Become Human. You seem a guy who likes immersive storytelling. I’d love to read you tackle on the themes of that game’s story and its approach to itself.

    1. Mephane says:

      At this point, I think it is better to deliberately avoid the PS4 and all of its exclusives. Sony has pulled one too many dick moves recently with the Fortnite account fiasco.

  24. Ninety-Three says:

    Typo patrol: “increasingly improbably packages on his back”.

  25. Preciousgollum says:

    This sort of became a rant of TLOU but heck I don’t have a video game blog and The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of all time.

    The Secret Ingredient: Naughty Dog is Nostalgia!

    OK, now that Charlton Heston has got that message out the way, let’s begin:

    Can I present a compromise and say that The Last of Us gameplay was enjoyably toned down and minimalist, also, it was very generous with its game length – hitting the RE4-style 15-18 hour campaign length.

    Since other people have mentioned Splinter Cell Conviction (2010), well… SCC also did all that Third Person action stealth before TLOU, in 2013. And so did Arkham Asylum (2009).

    It could be said that Uncharted (2006) inspired them, but Uncharted is a mix of Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider Legend and simplified Old Splinter Cell… and Resident Evil 4, and Metal Gear 3: Subsistence so… Nathan Drake stole, but he stole from the best.

    The problem is that this ‘Arkham-Style’ mini-game with Prince of Tomb Raider ledge grabbing is going to get boring at some point, but the model so far has been a foundation to use without the need to innovate. It also allows for technical wizardry to boost up ‘gameplay-experience’ of what is essentially an early 2000s gameplay do-over.

    So, THE magic ingredient of Uncharted and The Last of Us gameplay is … NOSTALGIA!

    TLOU and Uncharted are definitely good games for people that have a PS3/PS4. There is a lot of technical trickery behind them that is designed to impress rather than to challenge. To be honest, I think that most PS3/360 era console games look ‘rough’, and the Naughty Dog games are no exception.
    I think it is only Uncharted 3 that you can trick into playing at 1080p, and I wish I’d known that when playing it. In my view, the 720p/1080p TV divide has messed up playing old console games.

    Ultimately, TLOU and Uncharted are ‘simplified’ games that FEEL good to play, and have a production values behind them, WHILE FEELING NOSTALGIC. They’re Cover-based shooters that make use of some additional space and features.

    In terms of people using TLOU as a spring-board for thinking that they have played ‘The Best Game Ever Made’….HAH!
    They’re saying that because they feel special & privileged enough to have played ‘The Exclusive Game’. They’re the Sony equivalent of Halo & Gears fans. I’ve been all of them.
    Those people have MANY YEARS of past and future video games to dig through.

    P.S Arkham stole from Spiderman.

  26. Preciousgollum says:

    Does anybody else think that this console generation has been y,know, *whispers* not that good?

    I mean, it hasn’t been abysmal or anything, but it feels as though the industry just managed to scrape by after not knowing what to do. Some of the games that HAVE come out on X1/PS4 are ones which were previously stuck in development hell or rebranded, such as Alien Isolation, DOOM, and Prey.

    Looking back at the games that I remember playing on PC, a lot of them were actually Xbox 360 or PS3 equivalent. Even stuff like Alien Isolation, Evil Within or MGSV was technically on Xbox 360 & PS3. Dark Souls 3, well, that’s another Dark Souls game, and I’d rather have a bit less detail & better framerate than some extra shiny things. Wolfenstein TNO was powered by ID TECH 5, same as RAGE, so does that count?

    A lot of the newer games, such as Shadow of Mordor, I only got out of curiosity because they were very cheap. Did it even need a sequel? It was a BatSassins_ArkCreed clone with LoTR movie dialogue delivery. Mostly, people wanted it because there was naff-all available before.
    DOOM I did like, but, again, did it need to be so demanding?

    In terms of Fighters, well, It turns out some people aren’t fans of how Street Fighter 5 looks, and Mortal Kombat 9 will be remembered more fondly than MKX. Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite… yikes!

    Anybody know if Tekken 7 is worth it? Soul Calibur 6 has a chance, but there is no guarantee that it will stick the landing.

    What sort of games have you thought “Yep, this needs Next Gen Hardware”? Fallout 4 maybe, but that would be due to graphics mostly, it still suffers from Bethesda-itis.
    Rainbow Six Siege perhaps. It escaped development hell.
    Remasters? But then there is no guarantee that they will even be better than an old PC version at fraction of cost.

    So many re(release)masters of previous-gen.
    – even on PC (which is actually good since we get some of the SEGA console games).

    I dunno, perhaps it will get better, but I’m skeptical, since it feels as though the only thing that is growing in the medium is the Texture Size & Hard Drive Storage requirements. Games have got to around 10X hard drive space needs in as many years.

    Also, the insistence on Call of Duty & Battlefield pushing out their multiplayer shooters every 1-2 years means that, even WITHIN the communities themselves, they’re constantly being split into new sub-groups. And split again. By the time someone new buys Battlefield 1, for example… well, the party is over. Onto Battlefield V. It seems unhealthy.
    I think that is where some of the irritation has come from. Battlefield Fatigue. That’ll probably come out next year lol.

    I think people didn’t mind so much with stuff like Gears & Halo, since people were largely buying those for the SinglePlayer anyway. Call of Duty also. But who buys Battlefield for the singleplayer?

    Between Battlefield V AND Call of Duty BOTH covering WWII, other smaller or indie developers haven’t really got a chance at keeping up multiplayer numbers.

    Can anybody imagine Red Orchestra 3 being a success now?
    Starbreeze have been putting out THE RAID – WWII in a form of the Left 4 Dead clones they are good at. Then they’re obviously moving onto Zombies with Overkill Walking Dead.

    ‘Post-Scriptum’ is being talked about. Most of these smaller games will probably get some sales numbers, but not the consistent player-base needed to sustain them. Tumbleweeds a’blowin’.

  27. Jabberwok says:

    I don’t really understand why they can’t make a decent Spider-Man game. Spider-Man’s main thing is just swinging around the city, which calls out for a GTA-like sandbox. And we already have numerous examples of open-world games with superpowers. Toss in some collectables, and baby you got yourself a stew goin’.

    1. Preciousgollum says:

      They’ve made some decent Spider-man games. Spider-Man 2 (Made by Treyarch) swings to mind as the best… hehehe. Also, the original two games on the PS1. The original movie tie-in was… OK. I’ve barely played Web of Shadows (seemed alright) or Spider-Man 3 tie-in (suffers from ‘early-next-gen syndrome’).

      Since, Spider-Man 3 onwards, Activision movie tie-ins were uninspiring, and they keep trying to change the swing-mechanics, while the non-movie versions seemed ambitious, but less ‘lived in’ as open worlds. Spider-man games didn’t make a good transition to ‘Nex-gen tech’ of Xbox 360/PS3.

      I think the problem is that the games tend to want to alter the look and feel of the characters, much like the movies. I want classic Green Goblin & Hobgoblin etc.
      Especially original Electro!
      No redesigns to make it ‘realistic’.
      Spider-Man 2 got the look of Dr Octopus right, AND the game tie-in commented on how silly some of the other villains were. Spider Man 2 felt absolutely like ‘reverse-Grand Theft Auto’ – In the best possible way.

      Also, I suppose the other issue is that Spider-man probably isn’t the best or most favourite Super-hero anymore for anybody that isn’t a child. So, how do you make a marketable game under those circumstances today?

      1. Jabberwok says:

        Hmm, true that he does seem to have fallen out of favor. And that budgets probably tend to equal projected sales, which means a downward spiral for any franchise waning in popularity.

        Then again, all it would likely take is one good release to stop that. Nolan’s Batman certainly turned that franchise around. And people still like wise-cracking dudes in spandex, if Deadpool’s reception is any indication. I’ll admit that Spider-Man was never among my favorite superheroes, but I would still play the crap out of a game that made swinging around the city fun [and was well written]. I missed all of the older games. Movie tie-ins especially do not get onto my radar as games to play.

  28. StuHacking says:

    Death Stranding: I’m thinking “Dear Esther meets Katamari Damacy.”

  29. baud says:

    For the TLOU, I’m a little bothered that in an post-apoc setting, during the gameplay part, there’s so much stuff lying around, that should have been picked long ago, especially in an area controlled by humans, as stated by the big guy at the end of the video. I mean when civilization has collapsed, a lot of thing become valuable ressources, that would be picked up and used, not left behind.

    1. Preciousgollum says:

      or the TLOU, I’m a little bothered that in an post-apoc setting, during the gameplay part, there’s so much stuff lying around, that should have been picked long ago, especially in an area controlled by humans

      The Last of Us should be renamed to ‘So Many of Us – Part Goons’.

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply to zachThePerson Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.